UW worried about losing research faculty

In making a request for pay hikes for University of Wyoming faculty and staff before the legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee, University Vice President for Research, Bill Gern, spent a considerable amount of time discussing some of the major research faculty who are leaving U-W.

Gern says they have lost or are losing up to 20 key faculty members who are taking their research dollars with them. He says recent budget cuts have made it difficult for the University to keep some of these faculty...and their departure has a major impact on U-W.

“It takes a period of time to get somebody else back up to that same stature. So we’ve studied that gap, the gap between when somebody leaves and when somebody else is competing at that level the first person was at when they left. And that amount of money is in the millions of dollars typically and if they are high performers it’s in the tens of millions of dollars.”

Representative Bob Nicholas doubted that a simple pay raise would make that much of a difference, but Gern disagrees. U-W officials says they are also losing key staff due to the lack of raises.